Editing Checklist: 25 Checks Before Anything Ships

By Frederik Baun, conversion copywriter and founder of Words Sounds Visuals

I've run this exact 25-check list on every client draft since 2018 and built a free tool that automates the seven AI-era checks in it.

What an Editing Checklist Needs to Cover Now

Grammar checks alone catch maybe half of what makes a draft ready to ship. Spelling, subject-verb agreement, and comma splices matter.

But a draft can be grammatically perfect and still fail a reader three other ways:

• A fact nobody sourced.
• A sentence that reads like it came out of a chatbot.
• A paragraph so dense nobody finishes it.

I built my own list by working backwards from every draft that got rejected, either by a client or by the automated gate I run copy through before it publishes.

25 checks came out of that process, split into six groups that map to six different ways copy fails.

The Five Checks Every Journalism Copy Editing Checklist Gets Right

A journalism copy editing checklist starts in a different place than a marketing one, because a wrong fact in a newspaper carries legal weight and a wrong fact in a blog post just carries embarrassment.

Both outcomes are bad, so I borrow the newsroom’s discipline on sourcing and apply it to client work.

The first group is the one I check first. It’s the one client drafts get wrong most often. It looks like this:

1. Every fact traces to a source I can name.
2. Every quote carries a direct lead-in: who said it, where, and when, sitting right next to the quote rather than several sentences earlier.
3. Every first-party number states who ran it and when, because a score with no name and no date attached reads as an unsourced statistic.
4. I check every claim about what doesn’t exist with a search first, since the fastest way to get a post rejected is asserting something is missing that turns out to be sitting on page one of a search result.
5. No invented people stand in for data that doesn’t exist yet. If a case study isn’t real, I say so or I cut it.

This discipline exists because a masthead’s value depends on readers trusting what’s printed under it, and client copy earns that same trust the same way: one sourced fact at a time.

The Seven Checks Built for AI-Era Copy

These seven checks became necessary only in the last two years, once AI started making a large share of drafts sound the same. This is the part of the checklist that changed the most recently, and it’s also the part I check first now.

6. No graveyard vocabulary. I keep the growing list in a separate post, and if a word from it shows up in a draft, it comes out before the draft goes anywhere.
7. No filler adverb sitting on a verb where it adds nothing but a syllable. Cut it and the sentence loses nothing but the padding.
8. No causal scaffolding wrapping a plain fact in cause-and-effect dressing it doesn’t need. A fact that stands on its own doesn’t need a clause bolted onto the end for weight.
9. No label, colon, then the sentence itself. State the point directly instead of announcing it first.
10. No pattern that negates first and restates as a positive, structured as “not X, it is Y,” standing in for a sentence that has nothing specific to say. If the sentence loses nothing when you delete the negated half, delete it.
11. No em dashes anywhere in the draft. Full stops, commas, and parentheses do the same job.
12. No two fragments without a subject and a verb sitting back to back. One deliberate fragment lands as a punchline. Two in a row reads like a robot taking notes.

I got tired of holding all seven of these in my head on every single draft, so I built a free tool that checks a draft against this exact list in under a minute.

The Three Checks That Decide Whether Anyone Keeps Reading

A grammatically clean paragraph can still lose a reader on rhythm alone, which is why these three checks run on sentence shape rather than sentence correctness.

13. Average sentence length sits somewhere a reader can hold without rereading it. 15 words is a reasonable target, and anything past 20 is the exception.
14. I check reading grade with a formula rather than a gut call. I run Flesch-Kincaid on the body copy and send anything over a fifth-grade level back for a rewrite.
15. No three sentences in a row land at the same length. If they do, I rewrite one shorter or longer on purpose.

The Three Structure Checks I Run Before Anything Ships

Structure decides whether a reader finishes the piece, so these checks run on the shape of the page.

16. Paragraphs stay capped at a word count. 60 words is the ceiling, and most paragraphs come in well under it.
17. Every run of three or more items becomes an actual list instead of a sentence stuffed with commas.
18. Every link points at a page that’s still live, because a dead link is a broken promise a reader notices immediately.

Two Checks That Reset What Your Eyes Have Stopped Seeing

After a few passes on the same screen, your eyes stop reading the draft and start reading what you remember writing. These two checks force a genuinely fresh read instead of another lap around the same blind spots.

19. I read the whole draft aloud before it ships. Silent reading lets your eyes skip ahead to what you meant to write; reading aloud forces you through it at the pace a reader really experiences, and that’s where missing words and run-ons surface.
20. I change the font or the medium for the final pass, print it, switch to a different typeface, or read it on a phone instead of the monitor I wrote it on. The draft looks unfamiliar again for exactly long enough to catch what a comfortable read skips past.

The Five Mechanical Checks That Close Every Draft

The last group is the one closest to a traditional proofreading pass, and it’s still where most typos hide.

21. I check spelling and grammar twice: once at a slow read and once at the pace a reader would use, since each speed catches different errors.
22. I spell and capitalize proper names the same way everywhere they appear in the draft.
23. I check numbers and dates against the source.
24. Every quotation mark pairs with its partner, with no stray open quote hanging at the end of a paragraph.
25. I define every acronym on first use, so a reader who doesn’t already know the shorthand isn’t left guessing.

All 25 Checks in One Table

I run this exact list on every client draft, and on my own, before anything ships. Most drafts fail two or three checks on a first pass, and that’s normal.

The point is catching what a fast read misses before a client, a reader, or a search engine catches it for you.